Dr Caroline Watt: the Science of the Paranormal Transcript Jackie: Hello and Welcome to Forward Thinking, a Monthly Podcast From
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Dr Caroline Watt: The Science of the Paranormal Transcript Jackie: Hello and welcome to Forward Thinking, a monthly podcast from the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, where once a month we talk to our academics about their cool research ideas and projects. My name’s Jackie Thompson and today I’m talking to Dr Caroline Watt. Caroline’s a senior lecturer in psychology here at Edinburgh, and she’s also a founder member of the Koestler Parapsychology Unit also based at the Uni. We’re going to be talking about how the subject of parapsychology currently sits within academic research, and Caroline’s own research interests. We start the discussion off with the Koestler Unit itself, which is totally unique in that it hosts the only endowed chair of Parapsychology in the UK. It’s also celebrating its 30th Anniversary this year. I wonder if you could tell us about the unit Caroline, and what makes it a valuable part of the psychology department? Caroline: Well, we had an unusual start. It all began with Arthur Koestler and his wife Cynthia Koestler, who sadly killed themselves in a suicide pact in 1983. But they left their entire estate to support the establishment of a parapsychology unit at a British University, and Koestler, although he was well known as an intellectual and a writer on political matters, also had a lifelong interest in the paranormal and in dualism; in mind-body issues, and Edinburgh University already had a researcher called John Beloff in the Psychology Department, who was a friend of Koestler, who was a dualist, and who was interested in parapsychology. So Edinburgh, because it was familiar with John Beloff’s work, were happy to welcome the Koestler Chair into the department. In terms of the value of the subject, surveys show that about 50% of the public have some kind of paranormal belief, and about half of these think they’ve had some kind of paranormal experience. So although these maybe unusual experiences and beliefs they are not at all rare. So to me and most parapsychologists, it’s obviously an interesting question- what lies behind these experiences, what are the consequences and the causes of these beliefs. Jackie: And how did you get involved yourself? Caroline: Well unlike some parapsychologists, I’ve never had any experiences that I personally think are paranormal. So I wasn’t driven from that angle. I graduated from St Andrew’s University with a psychology degree just at the time the Koestler professorship was being announced and there was a lot of press interest. And as a psychologist I was aware that people were having these experiences and I was just curious. So I wrote to the incoming professor Doug Morris and I said if you need an assistant let me know. Jackie: Interestingly enough the Koestler Parapsychology Unit is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year – has the approach changed over time? Has science or technology changed the way you study? Caroline: I don’t think there are any parapsychology specific changes, but there are changes, things like the – now it’s called the Research Excellence Framework- that have changed the way that researchers practice their research. There’s more effort to publish in high impact journals than there used to be, so there’s more pressure to do that and I think that atmosphere can sometimes make researchers a little bit more conservative. Having said that parapsychology obviously is an unusual area of research and there’s plenty of unanswered questions and there’s lots of experimentation to be done. Jackie: Can you give us a couple of interesting results of experiments that have come out over the 30 years? – that’s like picking a grain of sand out of a beach, but is there anything that stands out in your mind? Caroline: Well in fact this last year, because it was our anniversary year, I’ve been looking at the archives and I’ve actually created an online archive of publications that have come out of the unit. But one of the areas that we’ve done quite a few studies in is Ganzfeld ESP research- so this is work that uses a mild sensory isolation procedure and the idea of the experiment is that the sender tries to communicate mentally the content of the target to the receiver who is in the Ganzfeld environment, and they describe out loud any thoughts, feelings, impressions that come into their mind. At the end of the session there’s a judging period where we judge the receiver’s impressions against 4 possible targets and we can work out from that the chance expectation is 25%. So what we’ve been doing in these experiments (and this is a body of research that goes beyond Edinburgh and is conducted all around the world) is comparing the obtained success rate with the chance success rate. In Edinburgh, our success rate is about 29-30% which might not sound like much, but it is a statistically significant effect, and it is the same magnitude of effect that researchers have found around the world. So it’s too early to say that’s evidence for ESP, but it’s carefully conducted research, and it certainly deserves to be taken seriously. When we look at the whole data base beyond Edinburgh I think one of the issues is whether or not we’re seeing all of the studies and what happens with the studies that have not been published, and I did a quick search and found only about 13 studies (unpublished studies) and they had a hit rate that was much closer to chance. So what that means is that there’s a problem with publication bias in this literature, so the published studies are not telling us the whole picture. To deal with that problem in 2012 I set up a study registry, and again this can be seen on our website. This allows researchers to deposit the plans for a study publicly, before the work is actually conducted, and that will deal with the issue of publication bias because whatever the study found, people will know that the study has been conducted. Jackie: You seem to be broadening the interest to outside academia in a way so you’ve got the website, and people can go and look at studies, and I know that people are really interested in this subject, even if they don’t believe in it. You recently have brought some of the work of the unit to the public in an Edinburgh Fringe Show which was called ‘Unbelievable, the Science of the Paranormal’- what did you actually bring to the public and how did it go down? Caroline: Well, this was a collaboration with Professor Richard Wiseman, and we wanted to do something to celebrate the anniversary of the unit and to make a bit more of a noise about parapsychology because it’s a subject with baggage, and people have a lot of misconceptions – helped by things like Ghostbusters the movie, and it was an interactive talk, people come in, and it’s a relatively small group of 40 people, and they’re all given a packet of materials to work with and I take them through, partly with demonstrations, to show the psychology behind psychic experiences – so what psychological factors might make you think you’d had a paranormal experience, and also then show people how parapsychologists conduct control tests in the laboratory, and I lead people through a couple of tests. They get to do things like practice being a fake psychic by moving a pen through the power of their mind. So it’s a lot of fun but it’s a serious underlying message and that is that we’ve got to be very careful how we conduct this research, and when we’re doing this at the Koestler Unit we’re doing carefully controlled scientific research. Jackie: Did you find people were interested in it even if they didn’t believe in it? Caroline: Yes there was a huge public hunger for this – I’m quite passionate and really enjoyed putting this on, and like many subjects parapsychology is a subject about which everyone has an opinion, and a lot of people have had personal experiences. If they haven’t personally had an experience they probably know someone who has a family member or a friend, so it’s an area where there’s a huge potential for public communication and public engagement, not only to help people think critically about their experiences but also to communicate how to do research and what normal factors need to be controlled for if you want to actually assess for whether or not there really is anything paranormal going on. Jackie: So Caroline can you tell us about the sort of research that you do personally? Caroline: Well the last few years I was very fortunate to win the Perrott-Warrick Research Fellowship, so I had a dedicated programme of research support for that, which was looking at precognitive dreaming- dreams that have predicted the future. The work looked at both sides of the story, so some of the studies that we did looked at the psychology behind these experiences, so for example we looked at memory bias, and we found that people are much more likely to remember dreams that seem to come true than the dreams that don’t come true, and we have so many dreams, that just by chance every now and then everyday events will resemble a dream.